High Performance Rodeo: Real horrors influence new work by the Clowns of Horror, Mump & SmootBack to video

But for clowns that deal in blood-spurting mayhem, dismemberment and misery, it seems oddly appropriate that the dark road to Anything involved money woes, a house fire, a heart attack and a serious car accident.

The least lethal of the problems, although still quite dire, was that a grant the duo was expecting didn’t materialize, which meant their next show would have to operate on an extremely tight budget. Then a series of calamities occurred. It was John Turner (a.k.a. Smoot) who lost his house to fire, Michael Kennard (Mump) who had a heart attack, and Calgary-based directed Karen Hines who experienced a bad car accident.

“We try not to live our lives on stage, we try to reinvent it with imagination through the characters and their world and stuff,” says Turner. “So there’s not a lot of clear, specific signs of those incidents in our lives. But whenever we get together to create a show we go over everything that is happening. It just so happens that the particular period since our last show, quite a bit had happened.”

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“We wanted to explore how anything can happen in life, so that’s where the title came from,” adds Kennard. “We called it Anything. The scenes we do in it are a mild reflection of that. We tried to create scenes where anything can happen and Knooma is death and she’s sort of taunting us to come.”

Hold on, longtime fans of Mump and Smoot might protest, didn’t the two clowns from the fictional planet of Ummo already die in a previous production? Well, yes. In an interview last year, Turner told the Edmonton Journal he was surprised that people thought Mump and Smoot had met their final doom in 2010’s Cracked: “we die in most of our shows,” he said.

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Negotiating with the Grim Reaper, in fact, has been a hallmark for the darkly existential clowns for their 27-year existence, which has seen them create and perform eight full-length theatre pieces. While Turner currently lives on Manitoulin Island and Kennard in Edmonton, the pair met in Toronto. This was before they signed up for a stint at Second City and long before they had the idea of becoming clowns. But Kennard heard of a course being taught by the late Richard Pochinko, who was well known in theatrical circles for developing a new approach to clown training.

Kennard, who was already interested in the field, suggested they attend.

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“John said ‘No f — cking way,’ says Kennard with a laugh. ” ‘I don’t want to be a clown.’ But we ended up doing the course and did one show at a festival in Toronto and people loved it and we haven’t turned back.”

As with all of Mump and Smoot’s performances, Anything comes with a warning that it is “not for children.” The advisory is there for their own protection, a pre-emptive strike so parents can’t complain after the fact that about the R-rated gore and dark themes. However, this does not necessarily stop parents from bringing their kids just the same.

“We didn’t want to do children’s theatre and we didn’t want to do family theatre,” Kennard says. “We didn’t want to be playing to kids in the audience. But what’s happened is a lot of fans have grown up to have families and every so often they will sneak their kids in. They know what it’s all about. It’s not that kids don’t like it. Kids love it. It’s like the cartoons they see on TV. It’s actually a gift when a kid shows up, because one of us or both of us will go out and say ‘How did you get in here?’ and hoist them up in the air and say, ‘Look how small they are.'”

Spotlight

Previews for Anything start Tuesday as part of the High Performance Rodeo at the Martha Cohen Theatre and run until Feb. 1. Visit hprodeo.ca

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